Oculus Rifts are shipping. The HTC Vive is just weeks away. For years, VR coverage has been all about the future. But this week, finally, it's about the present. VR has arrived, and to celebrate, we have a whole week of VR stories for you to read.
What does that mean? Look for:
- Guides to building PCs primed for VR (from the affordable low-end to the luxurious high-end)
- Guides to prepping your existing PC and room for VR
- Reviews and further impressions of the Oculus Rift launch games
- Interviews with the Oculus Rift leadership
- In-depth testing of the latest VR drivers and how VR performs on AMD and Nvidia hardware
- A feature that dives deep into 3D audio
- Our review of the Oculus Rift
And that's just the new stuff. We've been covering VR for a long time now, and have already assembled a collection of great VR material you can find on our virtual reality page here.
Look for our review of the Oculus Rift near the end of the week—we're still trying out its 30 launch games, evaluating its hardware, and testing its performance on multiple systems. Check back here all week to find a collection of our VR week posts as they arrive.
VR week starts here
The best VR headset: If you're looking to order a Rift or Vive right now, read this first.
Build an Oculus Rift PC on the cheap: Alex looks at the lowest cost way to get going with VR without sacrificing performance. And it works.
The quest to solve VR's biggest problem: walking around: We look at what developers are doing to allow you to explore in VR without bumping into walls in real life.
How Futuremark's VRMark will test performance and latency: Jarred looks at the technical side of a tricky new problem: How do you benchmark VR tech?
Impressions on all 30 Oculus Rift launch games: We've already spent a lot of time in the Rift and have tested nearly every single launch title. Here are our impressions on them, with more to come.
How to prepare your PC and room for VR: Our updated guide to setting up a VR playspace, even if you don't have a dedicated VR room. What you need for the Rift (not much) and the Vive (a lot more space).
How to set up the Oculus Rift: A guide with the best tips and tricks to quickly and comfortably setting up your Oculus Rift, including how to change the install directory of Oculus Store games.
We test 15 graphics cards to find the best one for VR: So many graphics cards. We ran as many graphics cards as we could through a VR benchmark to see how they rate.
Oculus Rift requires an opt-in to run games from other sources: Epic's Tim Sweeney has issues with Oculus not supporting games from Steam and others out of the box.
Why asynchronous time-warp in the Oculus Rift matters: How the Rift gets around making you throw your lunch when you're playing in VR.
